Freedom of speech takes a fall

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THE ANDREW Fraser affair is not the first time an attempt has
been made to stop discussion of race and IQ at Macquarie
University. It also happened when I was a student there in 1977.
The British psychologist Hans Eysenck was visiting Australia to
talk about the subject, and had already had a lecture stopped by
demonstrators at Sydney University. At Macquarie the university
administration, to its credit, made sure the talk went ahead. That
was in the days when its security guards were used to protect free
speech, not suppress it.

We often hear that tolerance is a - perhaps the - central
Australian value. But its meaning tends to shift depending on the
issue at stake. Recall the slogan "All animals are equal" in
Animal Farm. In the closing pages of George Orwell's book,
this receives the qualification "but some animals are more equal
than others". Likewise with tolerance, some views seem to be more
tolerable than others.

Intellectuals have generally been tolerant of extreme views on
the left. At Macquarie I studied a course called Marxism, run by
people who appeared to believe in it. At least one was a member of
the Communist Party of Australia, dedicated to the overthrow of our
social system by force. This situation was public knowledge, by no
means unique to Macquarie. It was deeply offensive to the many
Australians who'd suffered at the hands of communist regimes, but
it was generally tolerated on the grounds of free speech.

In contrast, many intellectuals were vicious in their
condemnation of Pauline Hanson, predicting she would unleash the
innate racism of ordinary Australians and turn them against
immigration. In fact, according to the Australian Electoral Survey,
voters who thought immigration levels too high dropped from 61.9
per cent in 1996 (when Hanson erupted) to 41.3 per cent in 1998 and
33.6 per cent in 2001.

It was also widely predicted that Hanson and One Nation would
excite violent racists and produce blood in the streets. But it was
her supporters who were beaten, abused and intimidated around
Australia. It was her meetings that were shut down due to violence
and threatened violence. We need to remember this now, when
Macquarie University evokes concerns about safety to justify its
extraordinary decision to ban Fraser from teaching.

Many of those who've commented on this affair have said or
assumed that Fraser's views have no intellectual credibility. But
is this right? In 1994 in America the book The Bell Curve
appeared. Authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued,
like Fraser, that Asians have higher IQs than white people, while
black people have lower ones. The book became a controversial
bestseller in the United States and led to enormous public debate.
Many experts, including Howard Gardner and Stephen Jay Gould,
disagreed with the book. But many others supported its views or
acknowledged they were based on reputable research. According to
Wikipedia, these included 52 professors who signed a letter to
The Wall Street Journal, and a taskforce of the American
Psychological Association. It's interesting that America, where
race is a big issue, was able to have this debate, while Australia
cannot.

Many years after Eysenck's visit to Macquarie I met him, and
asked why he was so drawn to controversial research. He said it was
intellectually productive because it forced him to reconsider basic
assumptions, in this case the nature of IQ testing, the extent to
which any IQ differences are the result of nature or nurture, and
whether anything could be done to narrow gaps between average
racial IQs if these were found. (At that stage he was looking at
the role of nutrition.) He added that as opponents can't know the
consequences of research or of the discussion of its findings,
their opposition might actually hurt the people they're trying to
protect. Hence any moral argument for the suppression of debate
needs to be questioned in its own terms and in relation to academic
independence.

Fraser says Tim Sprague, Macquarie's director of human
resources, told him last week that the university was a business
that needed to attract foreign students. This is certainly true: 31
per cent of all its students, and according to Fraser more than
half the full-time ones, are fee-paying. (The university did not
respond to my query for the exact full-time figure.) Fraser says
Sprague told him his comments on immigration were interfering with
the university's capacity to attract these students, most of whom
are Asian.

Macquarie's vice-chancellor, Di Yerbury has denied that Sprague
had said this and said, "our earnings from international education
have not been part of our thinking on this matter". Nor was there
any wish "to stifle debate on campus".

She also said that if Fraser had agreed to resign, as the
university wanted, this would have given him "even more
opportunity, not less" to exercise his right to free speech.